In Bogotá, Colombia, where I am researching a unique Andean ecosystem, I’ve encountered the phrase “Agua es vida” everywhere. From a city employee explaining why water rationing is necessary; from our nanny, who tells me that she would rather have days without electricity than without running water; from a man speaking about the pollution that mining precious metals for cellphone chips is causing on the Vaupés River. Water is life. The phrase has also been used as a rallying cry. Those organizing in opposition to pipelines in South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Rhode Island carry the dictum on their lips. I am tempted to dismiss it as cliché, an environmental platitude, yet there is something enchanting about these words, a kind of spell they cast, which gently tugs me toward some blunt, yet hard to grasp, truth.
When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. “You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,” she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. “You and I are women; we give life,” Angela countered. She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. “The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.” I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division.
Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise. Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don’t have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction. By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not.
The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. “Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,” Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them. Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.)
Some view the solution through a legal lens. If we can recognize these “brutes” as beings to whom basic rights are granted––think: the river’s right to flow unimpeded and unpolluted––our relationship to nature will evolve. This kind of thinking has led to the rise of a growing global phenomenon known as the Rights of Nature movement. Ecuador, Panama, New Zealand, Bolivia, India, and even some cities in the United States have––thanks, in most cases, to pressure from local Indigenous groups––enshrined the rights of nature in their governing documents. These rights can serve as potent legal tools in the battle to stop practices such as fracking, mining, deforestation, and the damming of rivers.
Early on in his book, Macfarlane recalls telling his son the title of his project. The son’s response is plain: “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!” Of course a river is alive. The pair have recently visited springs near their home. “I cannot quite understand why we are going,” Macfarlane writes, “but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood’s cool.” There they discover that the water has all but disappeared after months of record-breaking heat. Through the book, father and son will return regularly to these springs, bearing witness to their changes. This punctuated in-placeness is what makes the three longer journeys Macfarlane undertakes––to an Andean cloud forest; a wounded river basin in Chennai, India; and an undamned river in uppermost Canada––land effectively. To learn to recognize the aliveness of what we have been taught to think of as inert matter demands, above all else, time and attention. To see a glacier retreat, we need to watch its movements for years; to know how a river wanders, we must walk its banks during both flood and drought.
Most of the children in my life stare awestruck at the natural world. Trees speak, mountains ponder, hummingbirds have secret missions all their own. With time, this enchantment usually passes. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, argues that this is, in part, a linguistic problem. In English, we use the impersonal pronoun it to speak of animals, plants, bodies of water, geographical features. We say “a river that flows” as opposed to “a river who flows.” As I read Is a River Alive?, I found myself underlining sentence after sentence as verbs animated the world. “Leaves nod in the rain.” “Mist hangs in scarves.” “The light of the rising sun sets the world ringing like a singing bowl.” Macfarlane’s prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one’s child-mind and its inherent wonder. Agua es vida.
And yet this deep sense of enchantment and play is tempered throughout by grief—not only grief at the ways in which humans have fundamentally perverted so many of Earth’s most magnificent rivers, but also grief of a more personal nature. The researcher seeking rare fungi at the Los Cedros cloud forest, in Ecuador, has just lost her father; the young man fighting to restore India’s Adyar River was beaten by his own; Wayne, Macfarlane’s traveling companion down the Mutehekau Shipu, in Quebec, dreams of encountering a dear friend who recently died. In the face of these losses, each person travels to a water body, dwelling in and alongside them for weeks or years. Each is, in turn, overtaken by powers much larger than the self. And I won’t say they are healed exactly, but their time spent on the rivers seems to lighten their individual burdens. “Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,” Macfarlane writes. “Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.” Then Wayne cautions, “This kind of merging doesn’t happen as an epiphany; it’s a chronic rather than acute process.”
The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has critiqued Macfarlane’s earlier work as falling into an environmental tradition that she shorthands as the “Lone Enraptured Male.” In these stories, as she frames it, white men sally forth into the wilderness, where they have some kind of conversion experience, then return to normal society enlightened and changed. Some of that is certainly at work here, especially in the book’s final journey, a two-week whitewater-kayaking trip. But for the most part, Macfarlane doesn’t dwell too long on his own experience, opting instead to listen to those who live alongside the water bodies that he is, admittedly, just visiting.
For instance, Macfarlane is accompanied at Los Cedros by a wide-ranging cast of characters: the mycologist in mourning, who discovers a new species of fungus that provides further protection to the forest; an expatriate who has camped there for years to keep the place from falling prey to illegal attempts at mining; a legal scholar “trying to generate and accelerate the ripples of Rights of Nature thinking worldwide.” A few years prior to Macfarlane’s sojourn, foreign companies purchased the right to potentially mine at Los Cedros. But when they began circling with chain saws, de-limbers, and log loaders, locals testified to the impact such actions would have on the river that runs deep into the forest. The judges who ruled that mining copper and gold would violate the river’s rights—they also join Macfarlane at Los Cedros. Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible.
Unlearning our obsession with Cartesian thinking demands humility, a willingness to let the lines blur between us and that great plane of existence that we have learned to label as “it.” Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future.
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